Part 1

Old Bratton, janitor at the studios of Station XCV in Hollywood, was as gaunt as Karloff, as saturnine as Rathbone, as enigmatic as Lugosi. He was unique among Californians in professing absolutely no motion picture ambitions. Once, it is true, a director had stopped him on the street and offered to test him for a featured role, but old Bratton had refused with loud indignation when he heard that the role would be that of a mad scientist. Old Bratton was touchy about mad scientists, because he was one.

For a time he had been a studio electrician, competent though touchy; but then it developed that he had lied about his age—he was really eighty years old, and he had been fooling with electricity ever since Edison put apparatus of various sorts within the reach of everyone. Studio rules imposed pretty strict age limits on the various jobs, and so he was demoted to a janitorship.

He accepted, grumbling, because he needed money for the pursuit he had dreamed of when a boy and maintained from his youth onward. In his little two-room apartment he had gathered a great jumble of equipment—coils, transformers, cathodes, lenses, terminals—some of it bought new, some salvaged from studio junk, and a great deal curiously made and not to be duplicated elsewhere save in the eccentric mind of its maker. For old Bratton, with the aid of electricity, thought to create life.

"Electricity is life," he would murmur, quoting Dr. C. W. Roback, who had been venerable when old Bratton was young. And again: "All these idiots think that 'Frankenstein' is a romance and 'R.U.R.' a flight of fancy. But all robot stories are full of truth. I'll show them."

But he hadn't shown them yet, and he was eighty-two. His mechanical arrangements were wonderful and crammed with power. They could make dead frogs kick, dead birds flutter. They could make the metal figures he constructed, whether large or small, stir and seem about to wake. But only while the current animated them.

"The fault isn't with the machine," he would say again, speaking aloud but taking care none overheard. "It's perfect—I've seen to that. No, it's in the figures. They're too clumsy and creaky. All the parts are good, but the connections are wrong, somehow. Wish I knew anatomy better. And a dead body, even a fresh one, has begun dissolution. I must try and get—"

Haranguing himself thus one evening after the broadcast, he pushed his mop down a corridor to the open door of a little rehearsal hall, then stopped and drew into a shadowy corner, for he had almost blundered upon Ben Gascon in the act of proposing marriage.

Ben Gascon, it will be remembered, was at the time one of radio's highest paid performers, and well worthy of his hire for the fun he made. Earlier in life he had been a competent vaudeville artist. When, through no fault of his, vaudeville died, Gascon went into sound pictures and radio.

He was a ventriloquist, adroit and seasoned by years of performance, and a man of intelligence and showmanship as well. Coming to the stage from medical school, he had constructed with his own skilful hands the small figure of wood, metal, rubber and cloth that had become known to myriads as Tom-Tom. Tom-Tom the impish, the witty, the leering cynic, the gusty little clown, the ironical jokester, who sat on the knee of Ben Gascon and, by a seeming misdirection of voice, roused the world to laughter by his sneers and sallies. Tom-Tom was so droll, so dynamic, so uproariously wicked in thought and deed, that listeners were prone to forget the seemingly quiet, grave, Ben Gascon who held him and fed him solemn lines on which to explode firecracker jokes—Ben Gascon, who really did the thinking and the talking that Tom-Tom the dummy might be a headliner in the entertainment world.

Not really a new thing—the combination of comedian and stooge may or may not have begun with Aristophanes in ancient Greece—but Ben Gascon was offering both qualities in his own person, and in surpassing excellence. Press agents and commentators wrote fascinating conjectures about his dual personality. In any case, Tom-Tom was the making of him. It was frequently said that Gascon would be as lost without Tom-Tom as Tom-Tom without Gascon.

But tonight Ben Gascon and Tom-Tom were putting on a show for an audience of one.

Shannon Cole was the prima donna and co-star of the program. She was tall, almost as tall as Gascon, and her skin was delectably creamy, and her dark hair wound into a glossy coronet of braids. Usually she seemed stately and mournful, to match the songs of love and longing she sang in a rich contralto; but now she almost groaned with laughter as she leaned above the impudent Tom-Tom, who sat on the black broadcloth knee of Ben Gascon and cocked his leering wooden face up at her. Above Gascon's tuxedo his slender, wide-lined face was a dusky red. His lips seemed tight, even while they stealthily formed words for Tom-Tom.

"Oh, Shanny," it seemed that Tom-Tom was crooning, in that ingratiating drawl that convulsed listeners from coast to coast, "don't you think that you and I might just slip away alone somewhere and—and—" The wooden head writhed around toward Gascon. "Get away, Gaspipe! Don't you see that I'm in conference with a very lovely lady? Can't you learn when you're not wanted?"

Shannon Cole leaned back in her own chair, sighing because she had not enough breath to laugh any more. "I never get enough of Tom-Tom," she vowed between gasps. "We've been broadcasting together for two years now, and he's still number one in my heart. Ben, how do you ever manage—"

"Shanny," drawled the voice that was Tom-Tom's, "this idiot Ben Gascon has something to say. He wants me to front for him—but why do I always have to do the talking while he gets the profit. Speak up, Gaspipe—who's got your tongue this time, the cat, or the cat?"

Shannon Cole looked at the ventriloquist, and suddenly stopped laughing. Her face was pale, as his had gone red. She folded her slender hands in her lap, and her eyes were all for Gascon, though it was as if Tom-Tom still spoke:

"I'll be John Alden," vowed Tom-Tom with shrill decision. "I'll talk up for this big yokel—I always do, don't I, Shanny? As Gaspipe's personal representative—engaged at enormous expense—I want to put before you a proposition. One in which I'm interested. After all, I should have a say as to who will be my—well, my step-mother—"

"It won't work!" came the sudden, savage voice of Ben Gascon.

Rising, he abruptly tossed Tom-Tom upon a divan. Shannon Cole, too, was upon her feet. "Ben!" she quavered. "Why, Ben!"

"I've done the most foolish thing a ventriloquist could do," he flung out.

"Well—if you were really serious, you didn't need to clown. You think it was fair to me?"

He shook his head. "Tom-Tom's done so much of my saucy talking for me these past years that I thought I'd use him to get out what I was afraid to tell you myself," he confessed wretchedly.

"Then you were afraid of me," Shannon accused. She, too, was finding it hard to talk. Gascon made a helpless gesture.

"Well, it didn't work," he groaned. "I'm sorry. You're right if you think I've been an idiot. Just pretend it never happened."

"Why, Ben—" she began once more, and broke off.

"We've just finished our last program for the year," said Ben Gascon. "Next year I won't be around. I think I'll stop throwing my voice for a while and live like a human being. Once I studied to be a doctor. Perhaps once more I can—"

He walked out. The rush of words seemed to have left him spiritually limp and wretched.

Shannon Cole watched him go. Then she bent above the discarded figure of little Tom-Tom, who lay on his back and goggled woodenly up at her. She put out a hand toward him, and her full raspberry-tinted lips trembled. Then she, too, left.

And old Bratton stole from his hiding, to where lay the dummy. Lifting it, he realized that here was what he wanted. Again he spoke aloud—he never held with the belief that talking to oneself is the second or third stage of insanity:

"Clever one, that Gascon. This thing's anatomically perfect, even to the jointed fingers." Thrusting his arm through the slit in the back, he explored the hollow body and head. "Space for organs—yes, every movement and reaction provided for—and a personality."

He straightened up, the figure in his arms. "That's it! That's why I've failed! My figures were dead before they began, but this one has life!" He was muttering breathlessly. "It's like a worn shoe, or an inhabited house, or a favorite chair. I don't have to add the life force, I need only to stimulate what's here."

Ben Gascon, at the stage door, had telephoned for a taxi. He turned at the sound of approaching footsteps, and faced old Bratton, who carried Tom-Tom.

"Mr. Gascon—this dummy—"

"I'm through with him," said Gascon shortly.

"Then, can I have him?"

Tom-Tom seemed to stare at Gascon. Was it mockery, or pleading, in those bulging eyes?

"Take him and welcome," said Gascon, and strode out to wait for his taxi.

When old Bratton finished his cleaning that night, he carried away a bulky bundle wrapped in newspapers. He returned to his lodgings, but not to eat or sleep. First he filled the emptiness of Tom-Tom's head and body with the best items culled from his unsuccessful robots—a cunning brain-device, all intricate wiring and radiating tubes set in a mass of synthetic plasm; a complex system of wheels, switches and tubes, in the biggest hollow where a heart, lungs and stomach should be; special wires, of his own alloy, connecting to the ingenious muscles of rubberette that Ben Gascon had devised for Tom-Tom's arms, legs and fingers; a jointed spinal column of aluminum; an artificial voice-box just inside the moveable jaws; and wondrous little marble-shaped camera developments for eyes, in place of the moveable mockeries in Tom-Tom's sockets.

It was almost dawn before old Bratton stitched up the slit in the back of Tom-Tom's little checked shirt, and laid the completed creation upon the bedlike slab that was midmost of his great fabric of machinery in the rear room. To Tom-Tom's wrists, ankles, and throat he clamped the leads of powerful terminals. With a gingerly care like that of a surgeon at a delicate operation, he advanced a switch so as to throw the right amount of current into play.

The whole procession of wheeled machinery whispered into motion, its voice rising to a clear hum. A spark sprang from a knob at the top, extended its blinding length to another knob, and danced and struggled there like a radiant snake caught between the beaks of two eagles. Old Bratton gave the mechanism more power, faster and more complicated action. His bright eyes clung greedily to the little body lying on the slab.

"He moves, he moves," old Bratton cackled excitedly. "His wheels are going round, all right. Now, if only—"

Abruptly he shut off the current. The machinery fell dead silent.

"Sit up, Tom-Tom!" commanded old Bratton harshly.

And Tom-Tom sat up, his fingers tugging at the clamps that imprisoned him.